Devex: President Bush and his development legacy
John Norris, executive director of the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at the Center for American Progress

“…While [George W.] Bush had campaigned on a platform of ‘compassionate conservatism,’ few expected global development to be a high priority for the incoming administration … But expectations, the global strategic order, and much of American political life were profoundly upended by the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Leaders of both parties quickly recognized that development was an important and undermaintained part of the U.S. international posture, ushering in a period of dramatically increased budgets for development … The administration launched two new, and massive, development initiatives that ran directly counter to the popular perception that Republicans either did not care about development or only cared about it for purely security purposes. These two new efforts, the Millennium Challenge Corp. and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief are absolutely central to Bush’s development legacy … If fortune does indeed favor the bold, most historians will be kind to the Bush development legacy…” (7/5).